scalp—seeing this, he set off with the bravado whoop, through the high lands, and as he rode a swift horse, he left them out of sight in an instant. He took a great sweep round, to avoid an after-chase. At night, he went to the town, got fire-arms, and provisions, and soon arrived safe in Georgia. Other instances may be related, but these will suffice to shew how serviceable such hardy and expert men would be to their country, as heretofore, if our Indian trade was properly regulated; and how exceedingly preferable the tenth part of their number would prove against boasted regular troops, in the woods. Though the British legions are as warlike and formidable in the field of battle, as any troops whatever, as their martial bravery has often testified; yet in some situations they would be insignificant and helpless. Regular bred soldiers, in the American woods, would be of little service. The natives and old inhabitants, by being trained to arms from their infancy, in their wood-land sphere of life, could always surround them, and sweep them off entirely, with little damage to themselves. In such a case, field-pieces are a mere farce. The abettors of arbitrary power, who are making great advances through the whole British empire, to force the people to decide this point, and retrieve their constitutional rights and liberties, would do well to consider this. Is it possible for tyranny to be so weak and blind, as to flatter its corrupt greatness with the wild notion of placing a despotic military power of a few thousand regular troops, over millions of the Americans, who are trained to arms of defence, from the time they are able to carry them—generally inured to dangers, and all of them possessing, in a high degree, the social virtues of their manly free-minded fore-fathers, who often bled in the noble cause of liberty, when hateful tyranny persisted in stretching her rod of oppression over their repining country? Tyrants are obstinately deaf, and blind; they will see and hear only through the false medium of self-interested court-flatterers, and, instead of redressing the grievances of the people, have sometimes openly {266} despised and insulted them, for even exhibiting their modest prayers at the foot of the throne, for a restoration of their rights and privileges. Some however have been convinced in the end they were wrong, and have justly suffered by the anathematizing voice of God and a foederal union. That “a prince can do no ill” is a flat contradiction of reason and experience, and of the English Magna Charta.[151]